


death knells

by serenfire



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Trauma, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Ongoing Childhood Trauma, Post-Canon, Protective Sibling Ben Hargreeves, Sibling Bonding, Time Travel, Un-Bury Your Gays, but not immediately
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 15:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18123332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: Dave dies around him again. This time there’s a woman with a scar on her face and a briefcase like his, watching.Ben sighs. “Death is impossible to avoid for long. You can outrun it, you can outwit it, but it will find you.” As if on cue, They twist in his gut.





	death knells

Dave dies around him again.

Leaning against the trench, he slings an arm around Klaus, and Klaus has come to appreciate the casual physical contact war allows between the two of them—late nights spent awake holding each others’ hands under the cover of darkness, all the time in the world, hidden in the jungle, to break away from the camp—and Klaus allows himself to wrap his arm around Dave, too.

Dave whispers in his ear, _When we get back, I have something special for you. I know it’s not your birthday yet, but I couldn’t resist._

And then the alarms sound, and Dave can’t resist a quick peck on Klaus’s cheek before he returns to his station, aiming his rifle and his sights beyond the trench, beyond Klaus.

The alarms blare all around them, and Klaus fumbles with the safety on his gun—

_Klaus._

He props the gun up on the battlements, the blaring racking his brain, and next to him— _remember, you have to remember_ —Dave, the soldier he is, solely focuses on the war in front of them, but Klaus, cheeky, cheeky, _a liability_ , reaches over and squeezes Dave’s thigh.

Dave glances at him sidelong, and a bullet rips through him.

He falls.

_Klaus._

Klaus screams, dropping his weapon, rushing to Dave’s side. “No, no, you can’t,” he breathes, the words falling out of his mouth. He clutches Dave’s chest, but with every heartbeat, blood rushes out of his wound. Uncontrollable. But this is war.

“I won’t _let_ you,” Klaus grits his teeth, holding Dave in his arms. He looks around—someone, somewhere, has to know what to do with him.

Dave rests one arm against Klaus’s hand over him, and the other on Klaus’s cheek. “Hey, Klaus,” he tries to say, voice rasping.

_Klaus. Hey, Klaus!_

“Medic!” Klaus pulls Dave back from the front of the trench, blindly dragging him through mud and through the other soldiers huddled together. “We need a medic!”

The mud-covered soldiers look at him, and there’s a gleam of something in their eyes, something Klaus doesn’t have time to investigate.

He pulls Dave away, bullets screaming through the air above them, and Dave is choking, rasping, gasping—

“You’re not dying on me!” Klaus screams. “You can’t.”

“Klaus, I—”

“Anything you can say to me now, you can say to me when we get you fixed up. _Medic_!”

He pulls Dave blindly into the medic’s tent.

Right in front of him is a woman, her hair perfectly mussed, bright red lipstick on, scar tissue around her mouth, teeth stretched into a wide smile. She wears—a dark black dress, but this is wartime, and everyone is in worn fatigues, not a costume— _remember, you have to remember_ —

“That would be me,” she says, and there is no emotion in her inflection.

“Help my—friend, he’s dying,” Klaus says, shoving Dave at her.

_Klaus. Wake up. Wake up!_

In the panic, Klaus notices a briefcase tucked in the corner of the tent, as inconspicuous as possible. He almost thinks it’s his, but it’s older. More worn. But Dave is dying right in front of him, and so Klaus turns back.

He holds onto Dave’s hands as firmly as he can as she injects an IV into him, so fast that it sprays over him, but Dave is already fading. Klaus can feel him slipping, the grip on his hands slacking.

“Stay with me,” Klaus pleads. “I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything.”

“Hey,” Dave reaches out to thread his fingers through Klaus’ hair, “It’s ok. It’s war. We always knew one of us would have to go.”

“But not you! Never you. I lo—”

The medic’s sheer dress catches his eye, and Klaus turns around—and he’s back on the front line again, clutching Dave by the chest, the love of his life slack in his arms.

He looks around. Machine guns pulse, trench dirt sprays across them, and there’s a flash of black velvet at the corner of Klaus’s eye, but the medic is gone. And Dave is dead.

_Klaus, oh—I heard a rumor you woke up._

He gasps awake, sitting bolt upright at the mansion table. In front of him is a young girl, a thirteen-year-old with frizzy hair. Allison.

The others are sitting at their places in the table, in the spots they used to sit in as children. And Klaus remembers. He remembers diving back into the camp amidst the screams of sergeants to get back to his post, he remembers clawing through his teammates to get back to his briefcase. He remembers sitting on top of a bed, Dave’s bed that will never be filled again, rolling the numbers on the briefcase with one hand and Dave’s dog tags clutched in the other, blood still fresh on them.

Klaus remembers pulling the briefcase open and feeling the rush of adrenaline as he is yanked back through time again, falling down at a bus stop in the present day, screaming and screaming.

He looks down at his hands, shaking and shaking. The only things he held onto during Five’s last ditch attempt to fling themselves through time again were Dave’s dog tags, in more tatters than before, but they travelled with him. They hide around his neck now, under the starched school suit he wears that doesn’t even reach down to his knobby knees.

Klaus presses a hand against his sternum now to feel them, hot under his touch. Hot because he’s involuntarily shivering, the memory pressing itself against Klaus like an unruly ghost.

He nods at his siblings. He’s okay. He really is. He’s awake now, and Allison squeezes his shoulder as she sits back down. Klaus inhales, smelling the fresh food that Mom has cooked, and it’s just like mealtime during his childhood. Except—

“Number Four!” Reginald slaps his newspaper down on the table with a palpable thunk. Klaus flinches, locking his arms by his side from instinct. Even after all these years, the muscle memory from pre-adolescence knows what to do in this situation. And if Klaus hadn’t let his current self take over his mind, reliving the worst incident in his life, he wouldn’t have faltered and fucked up.

“What is the meaning behind this senseless interruption?”

And Klaus doesn’t even know what he did, but his plate is broken into three pieces and liquid drips over his eye, so he must have rammed his head into the table. Another wonderful part of muscle memory that Klaus can’t wait to involuntarily repeat.

“I—I don’t—”

What can he say that won’t blow their cover? His siblings stare at him, and Klaus knows that they are willing him to not reveal any part of the fucked up fifteen or so years since this moment. Luther glares at him the most, and Klaus knows that all Number One wants is to make sure he doesn’t piss Dad off. Because all Dad wanted was order, so if Klaus gives into the natural order of their lives, this memory bout won’t be out of character.

Even thought it’s been so many years since Dad’s last intervention to train Klaus, every waking moment is still defined by it. So to play into it, to admit that Klaus is nothing but the fuck up the whole family thinks he is, is terrifying. Because Klaus knows that Reginald was holding back, waiting for Klaus to demonstrate that he really doesn’t know how to control himself, and then lovely old Dad would strike at the full extent of his power.

But Ben is here.

Ben nods at him from his seat at the table, and Klaus remembers the time after Ben’s death, when that seat went ceremonially empty. When Diego had thrown the seat out an attic window after no one acknowledged that Ben was _gone and would remain gone forever_. When Reginald commissioned a new chair to be built that was exactly like the old one, and that chair was back in their lives. Until, one by one, every Hargreeves fled the mansion until one remained.

Ben nods at him, and Klaus has communicated in silence with him for far too long, so he knows that Ben is giving him permission to do whatever he needs to do. But Ben wasn’t there in Vietnam. Ben wasn’t there to know the true consequences of Klaus’s actions, what it is really like when Klaus gets his hands in something and irreparably turns it all to shit.

So Klaus turns to his father and says, “Ghosts again.”

“Again?” Reginald Hargreeves scoots his chair back with an almighty screech, and Klaus flinches. The toughest drill sergeant in the U.S. Army had nothing on the vindictiveness of Dad. Now that he knows Klaus can’t keep a simple instruction, _control the ghosts_ , it’s really going to be hell. “Number Four, I thought your prior training was sufficient. But it seems remedial lessons are in order.”

He turns to Mom, who just stands there, a quizzical smile plastered on her face. “Lunch is dismissed early. Four, with me.”

And Klaus stands up from the table, turns to the rest of his sibling, nods at Luther. Luther nods back, the barest acknowledgement of Klaus’s sacrifice for the team.

He doesn’t look at Ben as he walks out of the room after Reginald, he doesn’t want Ben to see his trembling jaw or the tears that well under his eyes, threatening to drop. Ben has seen him cry enough.

As he leaves, Mom turns to the rest of the table, picking up Reginald’s plate. “You heard Sir Hargreeves,” she says. “Lunch is dismissed! You have free time until fourteen hundred hours. Remember, be dressed and in the courtyard sharp—”

“M-mom,” Diego says.

“Yes, Diego?”

He can’t find the words to tactfully stop her. And Diego has never found the tactful way to do anything; he couldn’t find out if Mom aided in Dad’s death without ripping the lifeblood out of her silicone veins. And it was only a week ago, crouched beside her at her nook, as he watched Mom die. So he can’t. Not now.

“Mom,” Allison interrupts, a hand on Diego’s shoulder. “If it’s okay, we’re going to visit Vanya.”

Vanya’s seat at the other end of the table from Reginald’s lies empty.

Mom’s dimples show through her sweet smile. “Oh, of course, Allison. But remember, she’s been running a fever for two days now, and I don’t want any of you to catch the virus she might have. So make sure to wash your hands, and no sharing water glasses.”

“Thanks, mom,” Luther says. He stands.

“Oh, you’re not going, are you?” Allison bites at him.

Luther seems taken aback. “She’s my sister too.”

“Who you—” Five watches furiously for Mom to traverse the seemingly endless room to put the dishes in the sink. “Who you tried to kill.”

“And how many people have you tried and succeeded to kill?” Luther snorts back. “I don’t know why you’re taking Allison’s side. At least you got paid for it, right?”

“That. Is not. What happened.” Five visibly clenches his jaw and doesn’t say anything else.

“We don’t know what happened, because you killed the entire organization.”

“Luther, you don’t know when to stop.” Allison looks at them all. “We’re—we should all go see Vanya. Because we all care about her. And if you don’t want to come, too bad.”

Ben smiles back up at her, and Allison’s heart breaks. They haven’t had time to catch up since he came back to life, looking the same as he did in all of her memories and absolutely nothing like his statue. Reginald was a master at rebuilding Ben’s chair but not at fashioning a memorial to him. But everyone else at the table is stewing—Luther is at least getting up to go to Vanya’s room, Five is incandescent with rage, Diego has closed his eyes, murmuring something to himself.

So she walks with him to Vanya’s room, making sure the rest of them walk in front of her so they don’t ditch.

Ben has immediately slung on his hoodie after standing up. _The hoodie he dies in_ , Allison’s brain helpfully supplies. But she can see that he’s strung out without it, awkwardly human again. Allison carefully takes his elbow and guides him away from walking through a door.

Ben interlocks his arm with hers immediately. “Thanks. It’s so easy to forget, sometimes.”

“I bet it is. I would rather not get you killed again from falling off the banister.”

Ben laughs. “Oh, I’m sure They’d catch me.”

He’s so flippant about a possibility of another death. But when you die once, it has to be old hat to do it again. “They?”

Ben raises an eyebrow, and from behind his back one tentacle emerges. Allison startles, _remember the bank robbery and the Eiffel Tower and two days ago in 2019 when Ben slaughtered people with his tentacles._

“Don’t worry,” he reassures, and it tucks back into him. “I haven’t called all of Them out this early in the timeline, so They haven’t gotten a taste for blood yet. But soon…”

Allison knows what he’s thinking. Reginald is making them into killing machines, and Ben was his favorite to test on. _Is_ his favorite. Allison can order horrible things to happen to people, but Ben can unleash the horror upon them himself.

“Let’s keep the conversation about something else,” she agrees, and they walk into Vanya’s room.

The room is exactly as picturesque as Allison remembers it, with books neatly aligned on shelves and the beginner’s violin resting in its case, sheet music balanced on the stand. There’s no hint of personality in it, because Vanya was never afforded personality.

Vanya lies on the bed, so small but befitting of her childhood frame. She sleeps without moving, as she has for the last two days since they had all shown up in the mansion, Five’s on-the-fly calculations getting most every aspect of time travel accurate. Allison sits beside her, and the rest of them crowd around. She doesn’t miss that Luther stands at the back.

“Hey,” Allison tells her, her newly whole vocal cords especially rusty when she remembers Vanya, out of control, overcome with power. She wonders if Ben has felt the same way his entire life letting Them out, if Number Six and Number Seven’s powers control them more than the other way around.

Vanya doesn’t stir. She breathes evenly, the unconscious mechanisms in her brain still fully active.

“We’re just here to say hi. Everyone is here.” Allison looks around the huddle. “Five’s here.” Five opens up his newspaper to a new sheet and Allison sees that equations and algorithms are written in bright Sharpie over the entire page, and Five starts to scribble more. He inclines his head when his name is mentioned, but he’s so ceaselessly busy. Fifty-eight years alone just made him need more time. “Luther’s here.” Luther, his arms crossed, just raises a finger, as if Allison’s calling roll or something. “Ben is here. Remember when Five brought us back, Ben’s spirit also got placed back in his body. And we’re all in our child bodies, so you’re about as tall as you are normally.”

“Trying to fix that,” Five says, Sharpie cap between his teeth.

“I am back,” Ben pipes up. “And when you wake up, I promise I’ll hang out with you—I promise I’ll hang out with all of you, since I didn’t really get to see anyone except Klaus.”

At the mention of Klaus, Allison’s heart falls.

“Yeah,” Ben continues, squeezing her hand, “Klaus can’t be here right now. But he’ll come by as soon as he can to say hi, don’t worry.”

Allison doesn’t know where to go from that, so she just finishes the circle. “And Diego’s here.”

Diego pats Vanya’s shoulder. “Hey, good job killing Leonard, by the way. I couldn’t have aimed better myself.”

They wait in silence.

“If she was going to wake up to any of our comments, it would have been that,” Diego tries to keep their spirits light. “It was pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

Ben fist bumps him. “It was.”

Diego just nods, and as suddenly as someone who has been practicing stealth can, he pulls Ben in for a hug. “I can’t believe you’re back.”

“Okay, okay, overstimulation,” Ben says, but returns the hug anyway. “I haven’t had any physical contact in years, except for that time last week I punched Klaus. All of this is…a little too much.”

“Apologies.” Diego hovers as close to Ben as he can without touching.

“So.” Luther’s voice is rough. “How are we going to wake her up?”

“If she has a fever, we let it go down,” Diego says.

“It’s been two days. She didn’t have a fever when she caused the apocalypse; she was drunk on power. She still might be if she wakes up.”

“ _If_ she wakes up? Of course she’ll wake up,” Allison argues past a lump in her throat that might be emotions, or it might be the memory of the wound.

Diego also fights against the same emotions. “We’ll w-wake her up if we have to.” He grinds his teeth together. He balls his hands into fists. “Don’t you think that would work?”

“Hmm?” Five offers, still engrossed in his math.

“If we woke her up. If we wake V-vanya up, then maybe her powers won’t. Maybe we can shock her into being herself again.”

“Okay, how do we do that?” Allison looks around. “We’ve tried adrenaline, we’ve tried smelling salts, we’ve tried loud noises, we’ve tried everything.”

Luther is deathly quiet. “Not everything.”

Allison regards him and slowly, she understands. “You can’t mean… Last time I did that, that’s what caused her to overuse her powers. Not me trying to bargain with her. Me trying to Rumor her.”

“Have you seen her react to anything you’ve said? Anything we’ve all said? Your introductions were nice enough, but she can’t understand us. She wouldn’t be able to understand you either, until it’s done. And then she’d be awake. Everything solved.”

“She can’t,” says a voice from the back of the room, and Five folds his newspaper, speaking directly to Allison. “You can’t Rumor her.”

“I—why don’t _you_ think I should?”

“You can’t make her do what she wouldn’t do without you,” Five says, and he steps closer. Allison holds her ground. She disagrees with Luther, but she disagrees with Five in orders of magnitude more.

“Why? Because Dad told me not to Rumor my siblings? Well, tough luck, I’ve done it before and it was fine. Not that I go around Rumoring people anymore, but if there was ever a time to do it…” She looks down at Vanya. She looks so peaceful. Her forearms are clear, no Umbrella Academy brand to speak of. “It would be now.”

Five’s jaw locks and unlocks. “You don’t know what Rumoring does to people. You attempting to Rumor her before didn’t cause her to unlock her powers, but… You don’t know.”

“Oh, and you do? No one knows what Rumoring does to them, because no one remembers it happening.”

“God, stop being so self-centered. It’s like you think you’re the only person that has ever made someone do something against their will.”

Allison is staring down Five—well, staring up, as she hasn’t grown to full height yet. But he’s also just fifteen too. “Aren’t I?”

Five stops. Holds himself. And turns away. Allison realizes her fists are clenched and she slowly releases them, half-moons embedded in her palms.

“Do what you want,” Five finally says. He turns around and walks toward the window, climbing through space, vanishing.

Allison is silent, looking through the space Five just tore open.

“Hey, Al?” Ben murmurs from right behind her, and Allison starts. “Do what you want. We’ll be here supporting you.”

“Thanks, Ben.” She leans back and feels his hoodie against her arm. Safe. Comforted. “I think… we have time. We can wait.”

“Of course. We have all the time in the world.”

“I’m going to go to my room,” Allison announces.

“Do you need any help?” offers Diego.

“No. I’ll be—” She looks at Luther but he won’t look back at her. “I’ll be fine on my own. I always have been.”

Ben trails her out of the room, and Diego is right behind them. They stop in the hallway, watching Allison control her rage with more poise than the rest of the family combined. Allison shuts her door with a soft _click_ , and as she does, Diego can see her eyes closed, meditative.

“Hey,” Diego asks Ben. “Are you all right?”

“You all keep asking me that. I’m fine. I’m better than expected.”

“How is the land of the living?”

“I don’t miss getting tired every ten seconds. Apparently my decades-long _siesta_ didn’t help me catch up on my sleep debt.”

“That’s a pain. Did you rest a lot while dead?”

Ben shakes his head in memory, a smile forming on his cheeks. Klaus screaming, Klaus OD’ing on pills, Klaus shacking up with a random person in the next room, or sometimes in the same room, Klaus giggling and asking Ben knock-knock jokes from a stolen library book that Ben could clearly see the answers to, Klaus sobering up at four in the morning and asking Ben deep questions about his life—his post-death ‘life.’

“No. I haunted one asshole around the entire time, and he didn’t do a lot of resting.”

“Wow, I hope that asshole learns to R&R, whoever he is.” Diego taps his nose, in on the joke. And then he remembers where Klaus is now. “I hope wherever he is, he’s hanging in there.”

Ben cocks his head from pure ghostly muscle memory, as if he was still without corporeal form, searching for Klaus’s signature across the world, ready to step through space and show up whenever Klaus needed him. The world is silent now. It’s silent like it was when Klaus had crawled through the vent, escaping the two assassins, and done _something_ that had wrenched him completely from Ben’s grasp. Now Ben is flesh and bones and his heart beats in his nervous chest, and the world is silent once more. “I hope so too.”

Klaus told Ben about the mausoleum once, about the crypts that crowded in around him, before dawn while weaning off the pills. He told Ben because he could start seeing the ghosts again, and they were hungry.

“They don’t change,” Klaus had told him, spread-eagle over a motel bed. Someone else, the person who purchased the motel room, was showering. Ben was perched on the side of the bed, making sure to stay clear of any liquids that might have stained the sheets in the previous act for which Ben did not stick around.

Klaus had tried to touch Ben’s arm, but he went through Ben’s form like it was nothing. “They’re always so vivid, so thirsty, screaming and crying and looking just like they did at their moment of death.”

Ben had put his hands in his hoodie. He was no exception.

“They’ve been like this since training, since Dear Old Daddy decided to feed me to them. And they’re always out of their minds. But not you. You’re different.”

Ben had smiled, nodded. He wasn’t going to tell Klaus. Klaus didn’t need to know that Ben was no different from the rest, and that if anyone else had killed him, he would be haunting Klaus with a vengeance after his killer. But. They both knew what happened that day, though Klaus had been spending the last decade trying to forget.

So Ben tells Diego, “Klaus will be okay. He always is. I have faith in him.”

“Of course. Of course he will be. And I’m worried about you, too. I really want you to stay alive this time.”

“Oh. Good luck,” Ben says, and it’s another side effect of corporeality that he just blurts things out. It’s his brain, shooting out responses before he can process them and stuff them back down, because they are not to be shared.

“Why good luck?” Diego prods. And Ben looks at him, and he remembers what Diego looked like when he found Detective Eudora Patch lying on the ground in the aftermath of her slaughter. He remembers Diego keening, screeching, touching her body with his ungloved hands, leaving fingerprints on her face, touching the wound in her chest.

Ben saw that same look in Klaus’s eyes when he died.

Ben just covers Diego’s hand with his own. “Because death is impossible to avoid for long. You can outrun it, you can outwit it, but it will find you.”

As if on cue, They twist in his gut.

Diego is thinking about the same event Ben is thinking about. “How can we keep you alive?” he asks, but he’s really asking, _How can we keep Eudora alive?_

Ben swallows Them down.

“There were specific circumstances leading up to my death.” He’s had a seeming amount of never-ending days to think about it and analyze the catalysts. “But there’s one thing that you really have to do to keep me alive.”

“Tell me,” Diego says. “I’ll make sure it happens.” _I’ll make sure that in seventeen-something years, Eudora survives._

“Well,” Ben drawls, “first we have to not let all of Them out. Ever.”

Diego wracks his brain, piecing together the timeline and what happens with Ben.

“The bank robbery,” Ben supplies. “The first time we show our powers. I let Them out. I can’t, this time.”

Diego pulls him into a hug. “I promise,” he says, and Ben returns the hug fully. “I promise we won’t let Them out.”

As they back away from the hug, tears forming in their eyes, Luther sits alone by Vanya’s bedside. He looks at her peaceful, sleeping frame, and his own isn’t so monstrous next to it. Yet.

Luther opens her bedside drawer and finds what he’s looking for. He pops the bottle cap off.

“Come on,” he whispers to himself as he tries to get Vanya’s mouth open and inserts two pills into her throat. “You can do this.”

Vanya closes her mouth and, so slowly that Luther thinks it will never happen, swallows. She settles back into the peaceful state of unconsciousness.

Luther sits back. His job here is done.

He stands up to leave, and a weight has been lifted off his shoulders.

Now alone in the room, Vanya twitches.

**Author's Note:**

> my [tumblr](http://rosesskywalker.tumblr.com/)


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